someone should invent a search engine where if you put in two keywords it finds pages that have both the keywords

[nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@xssfox I miss the days when you could search for "pyro necro homo nymphomaniacs" on Lycos, and get 65,000 results.

We used to hold competitions. How fucked up a term you could invent, and still get a shitload of results.

Modern search is indeed terrible, the golden age of search is long over.

But holy shit, it used to be sooooo much worse.

[bruce@darkmoon.social]

@ralf @xssfox

"Did you mean global thermonuclear war? I'll show you results for global thermonuclear war."

[rycaut@mastodon.social]

@xssfox and could even say search for "this work" and "that word" but not "this other thing"

Or could tell is to find pages with those works on a particular domain

or could put a phrase in some formatting - like say "something like this" and get results for exactly that phrase but not say "some like this thing"

all really radical stuff. not sure it is possible (other than the decades we did have all this and more... sigh I'm old)

[tiggy@mastodonapp.uk]

@xssfox

That used to be Google. But not now.

[lazyb0y@mastodon.social]

@DJGummikuh

no investor pays for a product that makes its users happy…

source: observation of reality

@xssfox

[lazyb0y@mastodon.social]

@bruce

was it YOU who made sure we’re really much much closer to the former than the latter?!

@ralf @xssfox

[dans@mastodon.me.uk]

@xssfox Ah, the halcyon days of search and also Gmail.

[krono@toot.berlin]

@xssfox

[ojrask@piipitin.fi]

@xssfox

utopian pipedreams such fantasies

[nnn@urbanists.social]

@xssfox

A duck-duck-go demonstration search for "+napoleon +manscaping" (both keywords are required) gets only one hit:

[dramypsyd@ohai.social]

@xssfox I'd invest

[roadskater@mastodon.social]

@pq1r @xssfox I miss the small furry creatures.

[pogohandshake@sportloto.company]

@NNN @xssfox but there are many more pages with both these words, starting from https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Hair

[athousandcateaus@tiggi.es]

@xssfox too complicated. wouldn't work.

[kristallpirat@chaos.social]

@xssfox Have you tried metager? it's searches over different engines.

[funkybob@chaos.social]

@xssfox The ability to return a page that matches even one word seems to have been lost to the ages, so asking for it to match 2 seems a big ask right now.

[twistylittlepassages@weirder.earth]

@xssfox *weeping in librarian*

[nicemicro@fosstodon.org]

@xssfox I yesterday typed something like "What is the snapd version packaged with Debian Trixie", and it found me the website containing "Trixie" and "snapd" which was the package information site

#DuckDuckGo #Debian #snapd

[keelan@mastodon.sdf.org]

@xssfox we could call it AltaVista

[smallsees@social.dropbear.xyz]

@xssfox I miss altavista and its boolean terms